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Millennia have passed
since you first called me archaeology.
I no longer require
your stone gods, your ruins with legible inscriptions.
Show me your whatever
and I'll tell you who you were.
--
"Archeology"

 

Wislawa Szymborska

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Instinctively we both looked for the inscriptions we cut, once upon a time, on trees and on stones, in foolish delight. We sought them like scattered treasure, on the strange cheeks of the old willows, near the tendrils of the fall, on the birches that stand like candles in front of the violet thicket, and on the old fir which so often sheltered us with its dark wings. Many inscriptions have disappeared. Some are worn away because things do; some are covered by a host of other inscriptions or they are distorted and ugly. Nearly all have passed on as if they had been passers-by.

 

Henri Barbusse

 

Archaeology of the future is what it should be called. Archaeology of the past is very interesting because it tells us what we once were. But archaeology of the future is the study of what we're going to become, what we have a chance to become...it's a missing element in our understanding of the universe which tells us what our future is like, and what our place in the universe is. If there's nobody else out there, that's also quite important to know.

 

Philip Morrison

 

It's so much easier to create our own gods; gods that are fully knowable. Those are the gods of atheism, occultism, religion and sometimes even Christianity. Then, of course, there are those prejudices that we demand of our gods. Women who take offense at a "male" God create for themselves a female or neuter god. There, we have all the racial gods, the black gods, white gods, and cultural gods, the Spanish gods, African gods, Indian gods and so on. All of them called god. And yet none of them are truly Him. Some may be tiny glimpses of Him. Maybe His big toe or little finger, but nothing more. Others are not even that. They’re only delusions from our prejudices.

 

Sean Sellers

 

Show me a country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of buildings so tall
And I'll show you a young land
With many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I
You or I.

 

Phil Ochs

 

Ruins—antique ruins at least—are what is left when history has moved on. They are no longer at the mercy of history, only of time.

 

Geoff Dyer